Gerald Schoenfeld

Brian Palmer for The New York Times

Gerald Schoenfeld was since 1972 chairman of the powerful Shubert Organization, the largest and most important theater owner on Broadway and in the United States. He was one of the most influential figures in the business of the American theater. As head of both the Shubert Organization and the nonprofit Shubert Foundation — a role he shared for 24 years with Bernard B. Jacobs, who died in 1996 — Mr. Schoenfeld controlled an empire with an immense impact on the cultural life of New York and far beyond. Mr. Schoenfeld died Nov. 25, 2008, in Manhattan at 84.

The Shubert Organization owns and operates 17 Broadway theaters and one Off-Broadway theater, the Little Shubert, as well as the Shubert Theater in Boston, the Forrest Theater in Philadelphia and manages the National Theater in Washington. The foundation has provided tens of millions of dollars of support to nonprofit theaters and dance companies across the country.

Mr. Schoenfeld and Mr. Jacobs, whose title was president, took over the Shubert Organization at a time when both it and Broadway were in a severe downturn, and they were largely credited with saving both. Their theater business grew into a modern and financially potent enterprise, largely through three major hit shows: “Pippin,” “Equus” and, above all, “A Chorus Line,” the 1975 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning musical. “A Chorus Line,” created by Michael Bennett and co-presented by the New York Shakespeare Festival, ran for 15 years and was for much of the 1980s and ’90s the longest-running show in Broadway history.

To help fill their theaters, they specialized in a rarely used technique; they became theater owners who invested in and co-produced many of the plays and musicals they presented. Mr. Schoenfeld and Mr. Jacobs, and later Mr. Schoenfeld by himself, would decide what shows would play their theaters, when those shows would open and when they would close. They would often be involved in casting and in helping to lure stars to Broadway. They were not immune from controversy; critics often questioned their taste, saying they were too commercially oriented and middle-brow.

Their shows included “Cats,” which replaced “Chorus Line” as Broadway’s longest-running production; “The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby”; the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Glengarry Glen Ross”; “Heidi Chronicles”; Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George,” which also won a Pulitzer; “Passion”; “The Gin Game”; “Amadeus”; “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway”; “Les Misérables”; and “The Phantom of the Opera.” Although there were some major failures, like the musical "Chess," the successes greatly outnumbered the flops.

The son of a furrier, Gerald Schoenfeld was born in New York City on Sept. 22, 1924. He graduated from the University of Illinois and served in the Army in World War II. After getting a law degree from New York University, he joined a law firm that had as one of its clients the Shubert Organization. “Over a period of about seven years, people in the law firm grew older, one died, another went off on his own and I ended up being the only one left,” Mr. Schoenfeld said in the interview. “So J.J. Shubert asked me, as he put it, if I wanted to ‘take care of our affairs.’ I said ‘Yes.’ I was 32.”

In 1957, Mr. Schoenfeld became the company’s primary lawyer and hired another lawyer, Mr. Jacobs, who was a high school friend. “You sat at either side of J.J.’s desk, from the minute he arrived to the minute he left, seven days a week,” Mr. Schoenfeld said in the interview. “Everything that came over his desk, we had to pass on. As a result, we had total immersion in every aspect of the business.”

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